Two sentences, consecutive, in the third chapter of this book:
Marxist-Leninists reject the concept of "limited sovereignty", being firm advocates of full sovereignty for each socialist state as well as the freedom for each to determine its own path of development and adopt its own ways and means in the building of socialism. But at the same time, Marxist-Leninists are united in their conviction that the decisions of one fraternal state should not be detrimental to socialism both within its own borders and within the world socialist system as a whole or to the international communist movement in its struggle for the victory of the new social system.
The first sentence repudiates the doctrine. The second restates it. A state has full sovereignty and freedom to choose its own path, provided its choices are not judged detrimental to socialism inside its own borders — a proviso that returns the entire content of sovereignty to whoever does the judging. The chapter then names the judge, quoting the formula adopted at the Moscow meeting of communist and workers' parties in 1969: "the defence of socialism is an internationalist duty of Communists." That sentence was written into the international movement's documents the year after the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia, and it is what the Western press called the Brezhnev Doctrine. The phrase "Brezhnev Doctrine" does not appear in this book. The doctrine does, twice over, on the same page as its formal denial.
Socialist Internationalism: Theory and Practice of International Socialist Relations is not a monograph but a treaty in book form. It carries no single author. An editorial board of eleven names represents seven countries — Bulgaria, Hungary, the German Democratic Republic, Mongolia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and the USSR — under the general editorship of S. Anghelov of the Bulgarian People's Republic, who also wrote the introduction. Roughly thirty contributors are listed section by section: A. P. Butenko and Yu. S. Novopashin for the Soviet side, F. Prikryl and J. Kulhanek for Czechoslovakia, J. Krüger for the GDR, J. Ladosz and W. Iskra for Poland, A. Széchy for Hungary. It was translated from the Russian by Barry Jones and issued by Progress in Moscow in 1982.
Romania is not on the editorial board. Romania appears in the text — as an agrarian country that built socialism, as an oil exporter, as a projected site for a Soviet-built nuclear station, as a growth index — but the Socialist Republic of Romania supplied no author and no editor to a collective volume on socialist internationalism produced by its own alliance. Romania was the Warsaw Pact member that refused to take part in the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 and condemned it. The reader is not told this. The arithmetic is nevertheless present in the book's own key sentence about the invasion, which speaks of "the allied troops of five socialist countries" in a pact of seven.
The date on the spine is 1982; the text closes in 1979. There is no reference anywhere to the Twenty-Sixth Congress of the CPSU of February 1981 — the Twenty-Fifth, of 1976, is the governing authority throughout, and 1976 is by a wide margin the year most often cited. The latest datable events are the declaration of the Warsaw Treaty Political Consultative Committee of 23 November 1978 and the Chinese attack on Vietnam in February 1979. The years 1980, 1981 and 1982 do not occur in this book at all, in some 118,000 words. Three years of history separate the manuscript from the English edition, and they are precisely the three years in which the subject of the book was decided.
The book handles Czechoslovakia three times, in three registers, and the registers are worth separating.
In the chapter on the national question it is an administrative correction: "Measures to correct this deformation were taken under the complicated circumstances that arose from the political crisis that took place in Czechoslovakia in 1968–1969, when enemies of the new system, opportunists, gambled on the mistakes that had been allowed in the past." The federation of Czech and Slovak republics is described as the outcome, "with the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia acting as a single guiding political force in the country." No troops appear. In the chapter on ideology it is a lesson in insufficient ideological work — "insufficient attention to consolidating the Marxist world outlook among the masses led to distorted assessments of social development and helped cause the socio-political crisis of 1968" — and the authority cited for this reading is Gustáv Husák, the man the occupation installed.
Only in the chapter on political cooperation is the military fact admitted, and there the book quotes rather than speaks:
In 1968 international imperialism supported an attack against the socialist system in Czechoslovakia. The defence of the socialist gains of the working people in that country became the key issue in the multilateral political cooperation of the Warsaw Treaty states. In fulfilment of their internationalist duty these states rendered the Czechoslovak people invaluable aid in destroying the aggressive plans of imperialist reaction and internal counter-revolution. "The action taken by the allied troops of five socialist countries in Czechoslovakia was an act of international solidarity, which accorded with the common interests of the Czechoslovak working people ... This internationalist act saved the lives of thousands of people, ensured the internal and external conditions for peaceful labour, strengthened the western borders of the socialist camp and destroyed the hopes of imperialist circles for revising the results of the Second World War."
The source given in the footnote is The Lessons of the Crisis in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and in Czechoslovak Society After the 3rd Congress of the CPCz, Moscow, 1971. That document was the normalisation regime's official self-condemnation, adopted by a party purged of roughly half a million members after the invasion, in a country under occupation. The invasion is thus justified in the voice of the party the invasion created, and the sentence a reader is asked to accept as testimony from the invaded is testimony procured by the invader. It is the oldest device in the literature and the book uses it without a blush.
Nothing that happened in Czechoslovakia in 1968 survives in this account. There is no Action Programme, no abolition of censorship, no Dubček, no fourteenth congress of the CPCz which met in a factory in the Prague suburbs on 21–22 August under the guns of the occupying army and condemned the invasion by an overwhelming majority. What survives is a category. Elsewhere the book sets the events in a sequence: "Nationalism, as events in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968 have shown, remains a powerful weapon in the hands of the forces of counter-revolution." Two attempts by workers and communists in socialist countries to alter the way their societies were governed become two illustrations of a single failing, and the classification is complete before any evidence is heard.
The most exact question to put to a theory of relations between socialist states is whether a socialist state may end them. The book answers by accident, in a single flat sentence about Albania: "Albania has also ceased to participate in the work of the CMEA and withdrew from the Warsaw Treaty Organization. The country no longer maintains diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and pursues what is essentially an anti-Soviet policy." A member left the alliance. The fact is recorded as a symptom of hostility and no question of right arises. Neither Albania's departure nor China's is treated as bearing on the theory; both are treated as evidence about Albania and China.
The contrast within the book is sharper than anything a critic could construct. Discussing the drafting of the 1977 Soviet Constitution, the authors report with evident satisfaction that during the public discussion "a complete rejection was made of all suggestions to introduce into the Constitution the concept of a single Soviet nation, do away with the Union and autonomous republics or limit the sovereignty of the former by depriving them of the right of secession from the USSR." Lenin is quoted at length on "complete freedom to secede" as the precondition of any genuine union. The right of exit is defended as fundamental for the constituent republics of the Soviet Union, where it was a dead letter, and is not so much denied as never conceived for the sovereign states of the Warsaw Treaty, where it was the whole question.
The point had been made, in almost these words, fourteen years before this book appeared in English. The United Secretariat of the Fourth International issued a statement on 22 August 1968, forty-eight hours after the tanks crossed the border; it was printed in Intercontinental Press, vol. 6 no. 28, 2 September 1968, pp. 692–693, under the heading "End the Soviet Occupation of Czechoslovakia!" It reads in part: "The Soviet constitution affirms the right of national minorities to separate even from the USSR, if they so desire, but the Czechoslovak people have been denied the right to choose their own Communist leadership." The same statement disposed of the pretext with which this book still operates: "The truth is that the 'counterrevolutionary danger' cited by the Kremlin did not exist." And it identified the motive as fear of contagion — the fear that the beginnings of workers' democracy in Czechoslovakia "stimulated the struggle of the young vanguard, intellectuals and workers in Poland, Hungary, East Germany and above all the Soviet Union itself."
That prediction is the reason the dating of this book matters so much.
Poland occurs twenty-four times. It is a country of Ukrainian, Byelorussian, Russian and Lithuanian minority schools; a coal exporter ("coal from Poland, oil from Romania and bauxite from Hungary"); a projected site for Soviet-built nuclear capacity; a line in a table of national income growth; one of the states practising multi-candidate elections. The adjective "Polish" occurs five times, always attached to a people or a language. Gdańsk, Solidarność, Wałęsa, martial law and the Polish United Workers' Party do not occur. Neither does the year 1980.
The word "solidarity" occurs one hundred and twenty-seven times. It is one of the book's two or three governing terms — Chapter III section 2 is titled "Comradely Mutual Assistance and Solidarity — the Essence of International Relations of a New Type" — and not once does it refer to the ten million people who by 1981 had joined an organisation of that name in a socialist country. Every strike in the book is a strike in a capitalist country; the strike statistics run to 1978 and stop.
This is the ordinary consequence of a three-year translation lag, and by itself it would prove only that Progress was slow. What makes it a finding is the sentence the book does contain, sitting in the chapter on the world socialist system: "Marxist-Leninists have never concealed the fact that they are ready to give a decisive rebuff at any moment to any attempts to export counter-revolution." A reader who bought this volume in 1982, in the year after 13 December 1981, held a book that could not name what had happened in Poland and had already authorised it. As with the Kronstadt–Hungary–Czechoslovakia sequence in the companion Progress volume Problems of the Communist Movement, nothing needed to be added. The category was installed and waiting.
Afghanistan appears once. Not as a war; not as a country in which the Soviet army had been fighting since December 1979 and would fight for another seven years. It appears in a comparison of electrification, as one of seven states whose combined population of 210 million produced a third of the electricity of Soviet Central Asia and Kazakhstan. Meanwhile the chapter on peaceful coexistence lists among the aims of the Warsaw Treaty states their efforts "to do away with military bases on foreign territory throughout the world and bring about the withdrawal of foreign troops from the territory of other states and to the creation of peace zones in various parts of the world." The demand is addressed to imperialism. There were Soviet garrisons in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, the GDR, Mongolia and Afghanistan when it was printed.
A theory of relations between socialist states has to account for the socialist states that refused those relations. By 1979 there were three: China, Yugoslavia and Albania. The book's handling of each is instructive.
China gets a great deal of space and all of it is polemic. Maoism is "a reactionary nationalist ideology veiled in Marxist terminology"; the Chinese leadership practises "great-Han chauvinism", territorial claims, subversion through overseas Chinese, and "The indignation of all progressive mankind was aroused when Peking unleashed an aggressive war against Vietnam in 1979." The verdict on the war is defensible — the Chinese attack of February 1979 was an act of aggression against a socialist state, and it wrecked whatever remained of the claim that socialist states do not make war on one another. But the book cannot use its own finding. That two socialist states had fought a war, and that a third had shelled a fourth on the Ussuri in 1969, is evidence that the possession of nationalised property does not by itself produce internationalist foreign policy. The authors instead reach for a moral explanation — nationalism was tolerated, chauvinism grew — which leaves the theory untouched and requires no revision of anything.
Yugoslavia is the more revealing case, because it is handled by omission. It appears seven times: as a country that built socialism from an agrarian base, as a multinational state, as a non-member of the CMEA that has developed cooperation with it. The expulsion of the Yugoslav party from the Cominform in 1948, the economic blockade, the show trials of "Titoists" across Eastern Europe, the entire founding episode of the problem this book exists to solve — none of it is here. Tito's name never appears. The first and greatest test of socialist internationalism as an inter-state doctrine has been removed from the record, and with it the fact that the Soviet leadership was subsequently obliged to admit it had been wrong.
It would be a poor introduction that left the reader with the impression that everything between these covers is fabrication, because the central subject is genuine and part of the material record is accurate.
The theoretical problem is real, and it is one Marxism had barely begun to address before 1917. Marx and Engels theorised the international unity of workers within capitalism; they did not theorise the relations between post-capitalist states, having expected few enough of them and expected those to arrive nearly at once in the advanced countries. What obligations one workers' state owes another; whether unequal development between them produces exploitation; whether trade between planned economies can be conducted on other than world-market terms; what an alliance of states with the same property forms and different national histories should look like — these are not invented questions, and this book is one of the few sustained attempts to put them in order. Its distinction between the general laws of socialist construction and their necessarily varied national forms is a real distinction, and its insistence that a form "of socialism, though highly suitable for one particular country, may be quite unsuitable for another" is a real concession, however completely it is withdrawn in practice.
The material relationships were also real, and hostile accounts have often understated them. Soviet aid built power stations in Bulgaria, the GDR and Czechoslovakia and was building one in Hungary; "Up to 1976 1,500 enterprises and complexes had been built with Soviet economic and technical aid in the socialist countries"; in Bulgaria those enterprises accounted for the whole of the country's pig iron, copper, zinc, phosphate fertiliser and calcined soda output. The Orenburg gas development and the Druzhba pipeline, "by which the Soviet Union supplies the European socialist countries with millions of tonnes of oil", are named correctly. After 1973 that oil moved on a five-year moving-average formula that priced it well below the world market, and the transfer to the smaller Comecon economies through the second half of the 1970s was substantial. The levelling-up of national income between the more and less developed members, which the book reports, did occur. This was not a purely extractive empire, whatever it was, and an account which cannot say so will not be believed about anything else.
The book also records, without appearing to notice what it is recording, the retreat from Comintern centralism. It quotes the 1969 Moscow meeting: "As there is no leading centre of the international communist movement, voluntary coordination of the actions of Parties in order effectively to carry out the tasks before them acquires increased importance." That is a real change from 1928 or 1948, and it was forced on Moscow by exactly the events the book will not discuss.
For Czechoslovakia, the statement of 22 August 1968 cited above, and Joseph Hansen's "A Political Disaster for the Kremlin" printed alongside it in the same issue of Intercontinental Press, which noted the emergency congress of the CPCz meeting in an industrial plant in the Prague area, the delegates entering "with the workers on the midnight and 6 a.m. shifts."
For Poland, the Fourth International's statement "Polish Workers Confront the Bureaucracy" (Intercontinental Press, vol. 18 no. 40, 27 October 1980), adopted 25 September 1980, which itemised what the August strikes had won: "the right to organizations of its own, the right to strike, the partial lifting of censorship, access to the mass media, greater religious freedom, the liberation of political prisoners persecuted for their solidarity with the strikers". Then "Defend the Political Revolution in Poland!" (vol. 19 no. 18, 18 May 1981), issued 3 April 1981 as the manoeuvres began. Then, after 13 December, "Solidarity with the Polish workers" (vol. 20 no. 1, 18 January 1982), issued 17 December 1981, which set out what the coup was for: "suspension and destruction of the independent trade union controlled by the workers themselves; elimination of the right to strike; abolition of the free and uncensored working-class press ... and the proclamation of martial law."
On Afghanistan the honest thing to say is that the reply was divided. The United Secretariat's meeting of 26–29 January 1980 produced three documents, printed together in Intercontinental Press, vol. 18 no. 8, 3 March 1980. The majority declined to call for withdrawal, arguing that "The withdrawal of the Soviet troops would in no way assure any freedom for the Afghan nationalities to decide their own course." One minority went further towards Moscow. The other minority stated the position that has worn best: "Without a doubt, the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan is being carried out in gross violation of the right of peoples to self-determination ... it is imperative that the Soviet troops withdraw from Afghanistan immediately and that the Kremlin recognize the right of self-determination for the people of this country." A tradition that prints its own disagreements in full, in its own press, in the month they occur, is doing something this book was structurally incapable of doing.
That, finally, is what Socialist Internationalism is for a modern reader. It is not a bad book about Poland or Afghanistan; it is a book in which those subjects cannot arise, because the concepts were fixed before the events and no event was permitted to test them. Its authors — three dozen academics in seven countries, several of whom had watched their own parties broken in 1956 or 1968 — were writing under a constraint that shows in every chapter: they could describe the pipelines and the power stations honestly, because those were facts about production, and they could not describe a single relation of political power inside the community they were theorising. The word they use one hundred and twenty-seven times is the word that, two years before this edition reached the English-speaking world, ten million Polish workers had taken for themselves. Nothing in the theory could accommodate that, and so the theory met it, as it had met Prague, with tanks and a footnote.